Amazon Cloud RDS Now Supporting Oracle Databases

On Tuesday, Amazon announced that its Amazon Web Services' (AWS) Relational Database Service (RDS) can now support Oracle 11G Release 2 databases.

The company had said it planned to support Oracle earlier this year but today is the first time the service is live.

There are two licensing models for those who want to run Oracle on RDS, Amazon said: "License Included" and "Bring Your Own License."

Pricing for the version that includes a license starts at 16 cents per hour for a small instance. That price includes software, hardware and RDS management capabilities. For those with larger scale requirements, pricing for large instances is 64 cents. Extra-large, double extra-large and quadruple extra-large instances are available for 85 cents, $1.70 and $3.40, respectively.

For those who want to bring their own licenses, the rates start at 11 cents for a small instance and 44 cents for a large instance. Extra-large instances are 65 cents, double extra-large instances cost $1.30 and quadruple are $2.60. Amazon posted a detailed spec sheet and price list here.

"As is generally the case with AWS, we'll be adding even more functionality to this service in the months to come. Already on the drawing board is support for enhanced fault tolerance," said Amazon Web Services evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post.

"When I demonstrate Amazon RDS to developers I get the sense that it really changes their conception of what a database is and how they can use it," Barr wrote. "They enter the room thinking of the database as a static entity, one that they create once in a great while and leave thinking that they can now create databases on a dynamic, as-needed basis for development, experimentation, testing and the like."

Barr said a Launch DB Wizard is available on the AWS Management Console that will guide administrators through the various setup options.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.